The name “John Doe” comes from medieval English courts, where lawyers invented it as a fictitious party name to sidestep the clumsy procedure for settling land disputes. It first appeared in filings during the reign of Edward III (1327–1377), as part of a workaround called the action of ejectment, and it outlived the procedure that created it by several centuries.1Illinois Courts. Illinois Supreme Court History: John Doe and Richard Roe
The Medieval Origin
England’s early legal system made land disputes genuinely painful to resolve. The formal way to challenge someone’s claim to property, called a “writ of right,” was slow, technical, and often impractical. Lawyers found a shortcut. They started filing cases using fictitious names to get around the procedural mess, and two placeholders became standard: John Doe for the fictional plaintiff and Richard Roe for his fictional opponent. The earliest uses trace to the 13th or 14th century, and the names were well established in English legal tradition by Edward III’s reign.1Illinois Courts. Illinois Supreme Court History: John Doe and Richard Roe
Why those names? Probably because they were common and unremarkable. Neither pointed to a real person. Both existed purely as procedural tools to keep litigation moving.
The Ejectment Trick That Made the Name Stick
The specific procedure that cemented John Doe in legal culture was the action of ejectment. Rather than slog through a writ of right, a landowner would claim that a fictional tenant named John Doe had leased land from him, and that another fictional person, Richard Roe, had illegally thrown Doe off the property. The real landowner wasn’t named as a party at all.2Mental Floss. Why Are Unidentified People Called John or Jane Doe
This legal fiction let the court focus on what actually mattered: who held valid title to the land. One old treatise put it this way — the person wasn’t suing another person. The title itself was on trial. The fictitious parties were just a vehicle to get the real dispute in front of a judge without the writ system’s headaches.1Illinois Courts. Illinois Supreme Court History: John Doe and Richard Roe
It worked. For centuries, the ejectment action was the preferred way to litigate land disputes, precisely because the fictional framing stripped away the obstacles that made older methods so burdensome. Generations of lawyers filed cases with John Doe’s name at the top, and the habit worked the name into legal culture permanently.
When the Procedure Died but the Name Didn’t
England’s Common Law Procedure Act of 1852 abolished the fictitious ejectment action and formally ended the need for John Doe and Richard Roe in court filings. By that point, the names had been circulating in English legal practice for roughly five centuries. American states that had adopted English legal traditions phased out the fictional ejectment procedure on their own timelines. Illinois, for example, saw its last John Doe ejectment case before the state supreme court in 1847.1Illinois Courts. Illinois Supreme Court History: John Doe and Richard Roe
The names were too useful to retire. Even without the ejectment procedure, lawyers kept reaching for John Doe whenever they needed a placeholder for someone whose identity was unknown. The term had outgrown the technicality that produced it.
Why John Doe Is Still Used Today
The medieval courtroom trick now shows up in several very different places, all tied together by the same need: a name for someone who doesn’t have one yet.
Police and Forensic Work
When investigators handle crimes involving unidentified victims or suspects, they designate unknowns as John Doe (male) or Jane Doe (female). The usage is embedded in official systems. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), operated by the Department of Justice, tracks unidentified remains across the country, and as of January 2026 it listed 15,484 active unidentified persons cases.3NamUs. Monthly Case Report January 2026 Police can also obtain a “John Doe warrant,” which identifies a suspect by physical characteristics or a DNA profile when officers have probable cause but no name.
Hospital Emergency Rooms
Emergency departments routinely receive unconscious patients who can’t identify themselves, and staff assign temporary placeholder names to keep medical records straight until a real identity is confirmed. There is no single national standard; some hospitals use color-and-state combinations, others use phonetic three-part formats, and some adopted first names from the NOAA hurricane list after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.4HHS.gov (ASPR TRACIE). Naming Convention for Unidentified Patients The placeholder usually stays in place until discharge, because switching to a real name mid-treatment can create dangerous confusion with lab results and imaging.
Modern Lawsuits
John Doe shows up constantly in civil litigation, though the mechanics have changed since the ejectment era. Plaintiffs file suit against “John Doe” defendants when they know someone harmed them but haven’t yet identified who. This comes up in anonymous online defamation cases, hit-and-run accidents, and police misconduct suits where individual officers aren’t immediately identifiable. The plaintiff eventually has to substitute a real name, and the statute of limitations creates pressure to do so quickly.
Plaintiffs sometimes want to be the Doe themselves. Courts generally presume litigants use their real names, but a judge can allow a plaintiff to proceed as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” when the case involves sensitive personal information and the privacy interest outweighs the public’s right to know. Cases involving immigration status, reproductive choices, or mental health are the most common candidates for that kind of protection.
The Family of Placeholder Names
The John Doe tradition produced a whole set of related placeholders:
- Jane Doe, the female counterpart, used for unidentified or anonymous women in legal, medical, and law enforcement contexts.
- Richard Roe, the original fictional defendant paired with John Doe in ejectment actions, still occasionally used as an alternative male placeholder.
- Baby Doe, used for unidentified or anonymous infants and children, particularly in medical and child welfare settings.
Other fields built their own versions of the same idea. In cryptography, “Alice” and “Bob” have served as placeholder names for communicating parties since a 1978 paper by the inventors of the RSA encryption system. “Eve” (for eavesdropper) joined a decade later, and “Mallory” represents a malicious attacker. Each name is a mnemonic for the character’s role.
The British military had “Tommy Atkins,” a generic name for a private soldier dating to the 1850s and most closely associated with the First World War. A 1959 usage captured the whole tradition neatly, listing “John Doe, Tommy Atkins, rank-and-filer, man-in-the-street” as interchangeable labels for the ordinary, unnamed person. The names change across cultures and professions, but the impulse behind them is the same one that drove those medieval English lawyers: sometimes you need a name for someone who doesn’t have one yet.